This ‘hidden’ smart light trick can tell you if someone has broken into your house – here’s how to use it
How to use your smart lights as coloured alerts
Hate loud notifications? This ‘hidden’ smart light trick can alert you to actions around your home by using your bulbs’ colours, and can even tell you if someone has broken into your home – here’s how it works.
Upgrading your standard light bulbs to smart lights is a no brainer at this point. Aside from not having to rely on pesky switches, you can turn your lights on or off anywhere in your home by using your phone – a game changer if you’ve forgotten to turn the downstairs lights off and you don’t want to leave your bed.
Smart bulbs, strips and lamps also give you more control over your lighting, as you can change the colour and brightness to suit the room and mood. Even better, you can connect your smart lights to other devices around your smart home to create routines and automations to make your life easier.
With this in mind, a ‘hidden’ trick that I recently discovered is you can use your smart lights as coloured signals. Even though they’re helpful, loud and constant notifications from your smart devices can get annoying. Instead, you can use your smart lights to alert you to things around your home using different colours.
The way this works is you’ll need a smart light of your choice and a smart sensor – you can also use your video doorbell but I’ll get to that later. By combining your smart lights with sensors, you can automate your smart lights to turn different colours to indicate specific actions happening around your home.
Let’s say you want to be alerted if your back door opens. To use your smart light as a coloured signal for this alert, you can select which light you want to change colour – or choose all of them – and set it to turn or flash a different colour. For this scenario, when your sensor detects the back door being opened, your smart lights could flash red.
While this idea is handy for telling you if your family member has come home while you’re out, this also adds an extra layer of security to your home. If someone has broken into your home via the back door and you’re inside the house, this lighting trigger can warn you so you can call the police and get somewhere safe. It should also hopefully scare the intruder off, too.
Another example is if someone rings your video doorbell. Of course, your video doorbell’s app will alert you but if you don’t have your phone on you – or your doorbell doesn’t have a chime – you might miss who’s at your door. For this, you could customise your lights to turn blue to indicate that someone is ringing the doorbell.
Depending on how connected your smart home is, you could set automations for almost anything, including weather and calendar updates. You should be able to do this with most smart lights, especially Philips Hue, but I’d recommend getting a centralised smart home hub that allows the devices to communicate with each other as this will make things easier.
To use your lights as coloured signals, go into your smart home app like Alexa or Google Home, and go to Routines – it might also be listed as Automations. Create a routine, and set conditions, like ‘When the back door opens’. From there, you can set the action as ‘Turn my smart lights on’, and you should be able to select the colour and brightness of the lights, and if you want them to flash or not.
